Thursday, January 30, 2014

Thought For The Day - Slow Motion Life

Another old article. 10 years or more vintage. I think I was a better writer then. Or certainly a more optimistic one.
Slow Motion
Pic. Satish N

Winners stretching themselves at the line, the wind gently leading gullible silky tresses astray, a moment passing in the bat of an eyelid, life seems best remembered in slow motion. The most ordinary things in life appear cloaked in magic once they are slowed down to that pace.
 
Our lives, on the other hand, are a dizzy blur, as we race along jumping many moments at once. There is no now. Its always later. We are already in the future looking back and front. We need more, and we need to beat everyone to it. All in the shortest time.

But how much ever we want to hurry it, time, in its own old fashioned way, comes in a string of moments. One after another.

S l o w l y.

Somewhere, people have picked up this funny notion that we can outrun time now and store up a bit of it for later. But time is like a shadow. It slows down if we slow down and zips ahead if we speed up. If we choose to rush our whole life, we find that time has also rushed along with us and we are still left with the same amount of time as the one who took it one moment at a time. Like greedy children who gobble up all the goodies until their stomach aches, we may have gobbled up our moments without savouring them, and now there are just not enough moments left.

Thankfully there is a solution. Slow motion life! The best thing about slow motion life is that we can start it immediately. Right now!

Slow motion life is simple. Take life as it comes i.e one moment at a time. Be fully immersed in ‘now’ because that is the only truth. Not the future, not the past. Be fully centred in the present and watch as everything slows down. Time slows down – and expands. We get to look at the sky. We find a smile easily. We find a moment for everybody that counts, everything that matters. We are more patient. Things happen the way we want them to. We listen to our own selves and not the babble of a million others. The babble of meaningless words said, and worse, unsaid.

Leaves falling off trees, clouds drifting about in the sky, eagles gliding the azure, waves rising and falling, the rise and fall of a sleeping baby’s chest - there is such a lovely rhythm to the beat of the universe. We can tune ourselves into that rhythm. Make it our rhythm. We can centre ourselves in ourselves and not somewhere else. We can be those people in slow motion!

Thank God for slow motion.

Aesthetics apart, I think slow motion is about the way of life. It is about complete control and focus. It is about deliberate action, about complete balance, about a perfect peace, about a wonderful state of mind that’s completely ensconced in love. It is the way of the monks. It is the way of the sportsmen, of kings and rulers, of wise men and of the saints. (Which does not mean that it is beyond us because it is the way of nature and therefore of us). After all nothing in nature appears to be in a meaningless hurry does it?

Slow down. Go the way of your true nature.

Life can get really    b e a u t i f u l!



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